COMMENT: What I’ve learned as a fact-checker

By Africa Check

04:53 | 27 December 2018 (GMT)

Don’t give up. You can’t check a claim about the future. False statements affect people’s lives. Fact-checking becomes addictive. Four new members of Africa Check tell us what they’ve learned this year.

In 2018, Africa Check welcomed three new fact-checkers and a copy editor to their South African office. Here Lloyd Hazvineyi, Cayley Clifford, Naphtali Khumalo and Mary Alexander share the lessons they’ve learned so far.

Lloyd Hazvineyi

Once I’d come to know of Africa Check’s existence, I would often browse the website to read the latest reports. Before I opened one, I would pause on the home page. I was in love with Africa Check’s motto, “Sorting fact from fiction”, which gave me a good sense of what fact-checking was all about.

One of the basic fact-checking skills I learned in my first few days was identifying the claims that can’t be checked. Claims about the future – such as tweet claiming that South African Airways would make a loss of US$ 1.1 million per day in 2019 – cannot be fact-checked.

And asking “What is the potential impact of this claim on people?” enables you to focus on claims that really matter. Africa Check often deals with high impact fact-checks that can affect people’s lives. Politicians, journalists, governments and celebrities should think about this before posting or tweeting – it could be the first step in countering the spread of misinformation.

After a few weeks on the Africa Check team, I now think anyone can be a fact-checker. You don’t have to be a professional fact-checker to sort fact from fiction: it should be a way of life.

Cayley Clifford

Time (and fact-checking) waits for no woman

I was to be disappointed if I thought I could cruise through to the end of the year without too much hassle. An outspoken hater of numbers, I was daunted by my first fact-check, which took me deep into the definitions of GDP, per capita income and exchange rates.

But there is no shortage of claims to be checked and no time to be wasted. And once you start fact checking, you can’t stop. It quickly becomes a lifestyle.You have to fight the urge to ask “Is that a fact?” in general conversation – much to the annoyance of your friends and family.

Check, double check and triple check your work

Seemingly subtle differences, such as that between “farm” and “forestry” workers, can completely alter the meaning of a sentence and therefore your fact check. Every word counts, so you want to pick them wisely.

Never give up

No amount of polite pleading can make a spokesperson take your query. Conversely, little compares to the feeling of exuberance when someone does come back to you. The trick is not to give up – even when you feel like a nuisance.

Naphtali Khumalo

I have learned to use different approaches to different sources. Hounding an academic to get information probably won’t work, although you do have to do quite a bit of sleuthing before even getting so much as a phone number. But government officials, on the other hand, need constant phone calls, emails, and WhatsApp messages.

Also – and this goes for both private and government organisations – you need to be prepared to be bounced around quite a bit, from one email address to another phone number to a different city and even a different country.

Mary Alexander

For years I worked on a good-news website – now defunct – that tried to change global perceptions of South Africa by presenting the facts. These facts were, I admit, often cherry-picked, and the language closer to copywriting than journalism. But the experience gave me a prickly awareness of blandly dismissive and ignorant statements about Africa.

I knew something of Africa Check when I started copy-editing their reports earlier this year. But I vaguely assumed the work would largely be a lot of fun debunking of racists. It’s not. A few reports check false statements by overseas media. But most of it is meticulous research in which the accuracy of every word, every number, measurement, date, symbol, link and source has to be painstakingly checked and verified, and then written in clear and dispassionate language. More than this, it’s fact-checking of Africans, by Africans.

False claims can change lives in countries with high inequality and where education is difficult to access. Sometimes the claims may seem trivial, but debunking them can prevent real fear. Other false claims could alter important life choices.

Inaccurate statements about government services can impede their delivery. Africa Check’s Promise Trackers inform people’s voting choices by tracking how well political parties are keeping their election promises. In between there’s plenty of good news, of functioning democracies facing real problems but taking them on. Not to mention the site’s wealth of guides and factsheets – none of them cherry-picked.

Comment on this report

I have always loved facts. As a child, when someone said something, I remember thinking, is that true? Since I’m an avid reader and researcher, I am always debunking popular misconceptions. This means offending people sometimes because I have come to find that people love their own version of events, no matter how untrue it is.
Please keep up the good work. And I hope you become the lead reference point in fact checking in Africa. If you do have an easy to navigate site like Snopes, please make it pervasive so more people use it. Well done!

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment

Your name*

Email*

Terms

Africa Check encourages frank, open, inclusive discussion of the topics raised on the website. To ensure the discussion meets these aims we have established some simple House Rules for contributions. Any contributions that violate the rules may be removed by the moderator.

Donate to Africa Check

We hold public figures accountable

For democracy to function, public figures need to be held to account for what they say. The claims they make need to be checked, openly and impartially. Africa Check is an independent, non-partisan organisation which assesses claims made in the public arena using journalistic skills and evidence drawn from the latest online tools, readers, public sources and experts, sorting fact from fiction and publishing the results.